Historical News and Views from the Empire State

Jeff Siemers: New York Indian Removal History Series

Jeff Siemers over at Algonkian Church History has finished his outstanding series of (nineteen!) posts on New York Indian Removal and written a summary post to put them all in perspective and to serve as an access to allow for reading the posts in the order they were written. Jeff is a Reference Librarian at Moraine Park Technical College (Fond du Lac Campus), he normally writes about nineteenth-century Wisconsin Native history so his series about New York is quite a treat and highly recommended reading.

Here is an excerpt from Jeff’s summary describing each of the parts:Part I: The Stockbridges Attempt a Move to Indiana. A letter from Thomas Jefferson is not honored by officials of later administrations.Part II: Eleazar Williams. A missionary among the Oneidas (see photo above), of mixed race (part Mohawk), is hungry for power, and envisions being the leader of a grand confederacy in the west.Part III: Why did They Leave? (The answer, of course, has a lot more to do with the intentions of white Americans than with the Indians themselves.)Part IV: Conspiracy of Interests. A book by Professor Laurence Hauptman describes the factors that led to the removal of New York Indians &#8211 he doesn’t, however, have a lot to say about the Algonkians.Part V: Jedidiah Morse. A Congregational minster has some influence in Washington D.C.

Part VI: Negotiations and Arrivals. Good historians have gotten some of this wrong. If you need to know what-happened-when vis-a-vis the negitiations and arrivals of the New York Indians in Wisconsin, this is an important post.

Part VII: Metoxen Takes Center Stage. The New York Indians were set up against the Wisconsin Natives. This post includes a link to a remarkable speech John Metoxen made at the Council of 1830.Part VIII: The Disaffected Party. Are the New York Indians going to be pushed further west? This question and other issues arouse tribal factionalism.

Part IX: Ellis Describes More Negotiations. If Andrew Jackson (pictured above riding a horse) wanted the Stockbridge, Munsee, and Brothertown Indians to move to some swampy land, how did they wind up on the good farmland east of Lake Winnebago?

12th Annual Algonquian Peoples Seminar SaturdayThe Native American Institute of the Hudson River Valley and The New York State Museum are hosting the 12th Mohican/Algonquian Peoples Seminar at the NYS Museum in Albany this Saturday, […]